Advocate for ethics-driven regulation for blockchain technologies

Blockchain technology can act as a shared database ledger that tracks assets and transactions with little or no oversight, but in theory unlimited users. Its potential applications, which range from smart contracts to intellectual property blockchains, indicate the promise of fluid collaboration, efficient remuneration and thorough management of intellectual property. However, there are still crucial issues including privacy, compatibility, liability and jurisdiction that remain undefined. Moreover, because all fields require specialized ethical guidelines, if blockchain technology is expected to make a significant difference in society, it also deserves its own field of ethics, such as artificial intelligence (AI), nuclear technology, biotechnology and space exploration. Leading minds across disciplines need to think about how this technology can be shaped to have a positive impact, first by examining what this field is capable of and its potential consequences. Central to the idea of ​​blockchain is, for example, the creation of decentralized, leaderless organizations. This raises the question of who is responsible when something goes wrong? Who decides what behavior is permissible? Thinking macroscopically, and into the future, if blockchain technology is expected to change the nature of money, how might this affect power dynamics, economics and politics?

From Dolly to Digital Ledgers

In 1996, when Dolly the sheep was successfully cloned, ethical dilemmas and slippery slope arguments exploded. Is the ban on human cloning, no matter how far in the distant future, consistent with human rights when it interferes with the right to reproductive privacy and autonomy? While this is an admittedly extreme comparison, shouldn’t the blockchain field also be working toward standardizing ethical research guidelines? For example, should we consider investigating and disclosing security vulnerabilities in a live blockchain smart contract ethically? The Twitter survey asked by Cornell University researcher Philip Daian found that two-thirds of respondents answered yes; However, we must remember that such an action could put the life savings of the participants in the blockchain at risk.

Moreover, Blockchain technology is extremely flexible and has developed rapidly in its various applications. In the healthcare sector alone, the blockchain market was valued at USD 2.12 billion in 2020. In healthcare, the potential to access input and consultation from specialists worldwide would embody the dream of democratized healthcare and electronic medical records. However, the architectural concept of a shared digital ledger to disintermediate the sharing of information across ecosystems requires information accuracy, minimized manual breaks in the process, and a resolution of the tension between the need for transparency and the desire for privacy. Although the transparency of the shared ledger brings with it the promise of greater integrity and accountability across an ecosystem, with increased trust among participants (based in part on the immutable nature of the ledger), and a reduction in counterparty risk, there are still many legitimate reasons to the fact that participants may not want to have full visibility across the network, so tailored transparency may need further development.

Be careful

Given the complexity of technologies emerging on the blockchain, one should carefully consider the moral issues that have or may arise when determining use cases. Moreover, we should not be blinded by the hype about this technology’s potential, namely the promotion of greater efficiency, security, privacy, integrity and its somewhat anti-authoritarian nature, but rather be realistic about exactly what it can deliver. The more gullible among us should be wary of the real potential for harm. The scope of blockchain, which should be regulated to some extent, should ensure a distributed architecture that can maintain the necessary communication and processing power to manage and process all transactional data. There should be regulatory bodies and institutions, insulated from conflict, that provide some degree of oversight to prevent, deter and punish abuse. While such oversight is arguably directly at odds with the libertarian freedom that this technology aims for, functionality undoubtedly requires the facilitation of functioning with rules and regulations based not only on ethics but also the idealized principles of fluid transactions enabled by this the platform technology.

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